Schadenfreude

Def:  "Hearing that your granddaughter cried when she learned that you couldn't come over for her reading lesson."

About A Half Day's Ride

At least that's what it was for Ernie who has ridden more than 1245 miles in 24 hours, just to get his "Iron Butt - World's Toughest Riders" plates.

Hadn't been on a bike since I sold mine last spring, and I was jonesing, and E has two, so we decided to do something with our Monday rather than wasting it working.  Got to his place round about nine and he says "You're driving the new one."  That's the 'Wing with just under 39 grand on it, versus the one with 244 large on it.  The "new" one is an especially swell ride.  1300cc, more than 100 hp with ABS, 6-speaker sound  -  more like sitting in an easy chair with the window open on a breezy day than motorcycling.

Headed out from his garage a bit after nine, northbound.  Took the 60 to the 10 to the 51 to the 17 to Happy Valley Road, turned west past Lake Pleasant, all the way to Wickenburg.

North out of Wickenburg, up the twistys of Yarnell Hill and eventually into Prescott where we had lunch, the temperature now at 48f.  North out of Prescott, up and over Mingus Mountain where, at somewhere above 7000 feet the temp dropped to 39 when last I checked it.  Hands cold, nose numb.  Down through Jerome, then Cottonwood, Verde Valley - God I love this state - hooked back up with the 17, got into the diamond lane and were back at the barn a little after four.

364 miles have rolled by.  I thank Der Ernstermeir and climb into the 'Burb and call the missus; tell her I know what I want for Christmas:  something to go with my GoldWing jacket.  Just like her, she pauses for about seven milliseconds, then says, "That's fine sweetie, what color are you thinking of?  Not yellow! And remember! We have to have matching helmets!" 

Ahhhhhhhh  My Life

Borat

I was mortified.  I dislike gross-out movies.  I haven't seen Dumb & Dumber and don't intend to.  I am so far and away above all that.  But She thought the movie might be "cute" so we nuked a bag of popcorn, grabbed a couple of sodas from the reefer, dumped it all into her big purse and headed off to our second-favorite kind of matinee.

Ok, the movie.  Geez.  This guy is really dedicated to his "craft."  He sets himself up to get real beaten more than once, and in the case of Miss Pamela Anderson, he could have (should have?) been shot.  There sure as hell won't be a Borat II.  There sure as hell have to be some red faces amongst the penticostals whose transmogrification he crashed, especially one US Representative in full glossolalian rapture.

My favorite line was at the end of his Georgian, I think, etiquette lesson.  After insulting the good parson's wife and returning to the table with a baggie of - well, I don't want to give everything away.  But as he and his "guest" are being excused from the premises the line is, as near as I can recall, "Why police?  Half retard escape?"

Oh, and another hint:  the closing credits, if you last that long, include an attribution for "Feces provided by . . .".   

But like I said, I am so above that kind of stuff.

Irony

I never thought it could happen, but I'm feeling sympathy for Donald Rumsfeld.  Imagine what it must be like to be told by George Bush that you're incompetent and doing a lousy job.

Another One Bites The Musk

Ahhhh, Pastor Haggard. 

"Brokeback Baptist Church"? 

There will be some doozies coming from the various joke writers.  Last night Leno suggested that the good pastor using church funds to pay for his gay sex trysts was "Robbing Paul to pay for Peter."

After ousting the former paragon today, a church elder predicted that "It's probably going to be a tough couple of weeks around here."  You think?

Fun On Ray Road

Waiting at the red light, westbound at the 48th St intersection in Nana's IS350. 

Gorgeous yellow Vette convertible rumbles up to my right, stereo blasting, burly bushy blonde bad boy glances over.  I smile, raise my eyebrows, implying the question.  Reach my thumb down to the dash and flip the toggle that powers the ECT/POWER dash light.  (I don't know, ectoplasm maybe?)

The light changes, the game is on, the jig is up.  Neither of us breaks traction, neither gets ahead of the other before we back off about six seconds later, him first, of course.  We get all those ponies reined in tight by the next light and sit there grinning at each other.  "Holy damn!  I didn't know those things were that fast!!" he shakes his head, ruing this day. 

I give him the V sign, turn left and trundle on down Ranch Circle, thinking about sunny days, fair breezes, and again about maybe the Cardinals training camp; not a thought at all about the Frys discount.

Big Numbers

Ten thousand five hundred.  10,500.  If that was how many shares of Class A Berkshire Hathaway you owned, that would be a really big number.  But it's the number of days my oldest daughter has been around.  Little miracle baby now caring for at-risk kids at Children's Hospital.  Mighty proud of her.

Another really big number, and a dreadful, somber one is 2,814.  That's the number,as of yesterday, November 2nd, of American deaths confirmed in the war begun by this disastrous Bush administration.  Almost 20,000 Americans maimed; hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghanis dead.  Can anyone seriously put forward one single thing that has improved as a result of this ignorant, lazy, incompetent pitiful-excuse-for-a-president's actions?  Record profits for big oil and Halliburton, I guess.

Note that there were a total of 2943 confirmed deaths as a result of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.  Chances are that this horrific total of American citizens slaughtered will be exceeded at the hands of this administration before the end of this calendar year.  And for what?  Who's the bigger threat to our national well being?  The "My Pet Goat" reader who sat inert for seven minutes after being told "America is under attack."  Here's hoping Tuesday is the beginning of a much needed regime change. 

The Coding Ain't Done 'Till Google Won't Run

If you love and use Google Desktop as much as I, don't let Microsoft "upgrade" your Explorer version to the 7 series.  Since I fell into their trap the Google desktop search function has been inoperable, and in order to find things I've had to use the clunky antiquated Search feature of windows.  This is really frustrating.  I doubt that it's a coinkydink that Microsoft is pushing its search engine Live.com so hard at the same time this "upgrade" is foisted on the unsuspecting public.  The one thing Bill's minions have never understood is that making something more complicated is not an improvement regardless of how many features are added.  Windows won't let me uninstall version 7 to reinstall 6, either.  Rats!  If anyone knows a fix or a workaround, please let me know.